Proven Ways to Use Texting for Your Small Business

Out of all text message exchanges, 16% happen to be with businesses. Coupons, discount offers, new product launch notifications, appointment reminders, order confirmations – companies send all of these via SMS to effectively communicate with their customers. Why is texting effective? 90% of text messages are opened and read within just three minutes of receiving. This means that you can leverage SMS in time-sensitive promotion campaigns, and for sending urgent notifications.

Possibilities are endless when it comes to using texting for your business. The team at TextMagic.com have outlined most common ones in their infographic below. Take a moment and look through them. SMS might just be one of the channels your company is missing out on.

Sales and Promotion Opportunities

Data proves that customers who receive SMS have a 40% higher conversion rate than those who don’t. Isn’t that a call to action? SMS coupons tend to have a much higher redemption rate than regular paper coupons. And the reason for that is obvious. People lose paper coupons. Whereas, an SMS coupon is with them every time they have their phone handy, which is almost all the time.

Only 17% of consumers find SMS from companies invasive. The other are open to receiving offers. That’s encouraging, isn’t it? Take the plunge and start sending out promotional texts to your clients.

Customer Retention

There is also another side to using SMS for communication with clients – improving retention. Send your customers flight change details, hotel booking confirmations, delivery notifications, and appointment reminders – all of these will show them that they are cared about.

SMS Reminders

Speaking of appointment reminders, they are proven to reduce the number of no-shows which are a typical problem for any business that operates on an appointment basis. Thus, a timely SMS reminder might save you time and money. Why send a text, and not call or write an email? A text, as we’ve mentioned above, will most likely be read within the first three minutes of receiving, while a call from an unknown number might be ignored and an email might get lost in the huge pile of emails from other companies.

Another important type of reminders that can be sent via SMS is payment reminders. Every business sooner or later has to confront the challenge of dealing with non-paying or late-paying clients. You can prevent these cases at least partially with the help of payment reminder texts.

Orders

So far, we have been talking about companies sending texts to their customers. Now let’s think the other way around – customers starting a conversation with the business by sending a text message. A good example of that would be Domino’s Pizza that allows clients to order by simply sending a short text. So instead of filling out a big online form to make the usual order, a person can just text “USUAL” to the Domino’s short code. That basically helps you avoid a barrier to entry.

Staff Communication

Apart from communicating with clients, texting can be used to enhance communication with employees. You can send out SMS to find out which of your employees can work night shift if one of them suddenly got sick. You can notify them about urgent meetings. And you can let them know if an appointment with a client has been cancelled. In all of these cases it is certain that your texts will be read within a short period of time, that’s why SMS remains one of the best means of communication when it comes to urgency.

The ways to use texting for your business mentioned above are just the beginning. There’s so much more to it. Now look through the infographic below and think how SMS can be leveraged for your business. Let us know in the comments section below.

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